This post discusses, in its entirety, the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

Over the past two days, I watched all of Netflix’s most ambitious original series yet, a remake of the British miniseries House of Cards. While the show raises interesting questions about both television business models and narrative structures, and while it’s deeply entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey, as Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood, chomp scenery and occasionally on Kate Mara’s ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes, I couldn’t help but feel that House of Cards has a fatal flaw. For all that the show looks attractive, and even half-authentic to the District sometimes, and for all House of Cards is trying its darndest to replicate the repellant chilliness of the British original, it’s actually far too nice to the people and institutions the show would like to skewer. And that’s because House of Cards itself falls prey to some of the kinds of thinking that are most pernicious in the nation’s capital.

Part of the problem is House of Cards‘ insistence that there’s a grandness, rather than a grandiosity, to Frank—while the show believes he’s malign, it’s still convinced that he’s Milton’s Satan rather than Dostoyevsky’s, who Arturo Perez-Reverte once described as “petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.” He declares in the first episode that “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” and House of Cards seems largely to agree with his assessment. Frank may hold up an education bill to get a version that suits his ends, or derail the nomination of the man who was chosen to be Secretary of State over him, but he does get a bill to the President’s desk roughly on deadline, and once the other man is out of the way, speeds the confirmation of his hand-picked replacement. What really distinguishes him from his colleagues, however, and what the show portrays as the source of Frank’s efficacy, however unattractive it may be, is his treatment of power as a higher good than policy. “Leave ideology to the armchair generals,” he says in one of his many editorial asides to the camera. “It does me no good.”

House of Cards is full of acid portraits of people whose conviction has made them weak or duplicitous without being excellent at it. Even if the show has some sympathy for their dedication to and principal on the issues, it never gives them triumphs over Frank, and frequently suggests that passion makes them obvious, slow, or otherwise unfit to play the game that Frank has mastered so well, his competence overriding our moral calculus. During a subplot that involves the passage of a major education reform bill, Frank’s partner on the legislation, a life-long liberal reformer who’s a stand-in for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy turns out to be a naive patsy without the stomach for compromise or maneuver. “I could put my mind to policy, but I’m no good at this brand of politics,” the man tells Frank in agreeing to take the fall for a leak of his proposed bill that garners negative press coverage, and to let Frank take over writing the next draft. His actual ideas about the issues are never mentioned, simply summed up by Zoe as “very far left wing” for a headline. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Kennedy is rotating in his grave fast enough to dislodge the dirt above him so he can haunt House of Cards writer Beau Willimon for this perfidy.
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I continue to believe that Zero Dark Thirty is a much more comprehensively anti-war film than the debate about whether it suggests torture works would indicate. And so I was interested to read Mark Boal talk to Vulture about what it was like to write those sequences, and about how he wanted the emphasis to be on what it was actually like to be in the room when someone was being beaten, waterboarded, and humiliated:

The scene that has been the focal point of all the discussion has been the opening scene of the film, and it was definitely among the hardest to have in my life, let alone include in the script. I’ve had to revisit it over and over again after the film came out, and those torture scenes are incredibly painful. And they’re meant to be! I wanted to show the brutality and inhumanity of the situation, and you see the prisoner’s brain getting scrambled by the pressure and the punishment that’s being put on him. It was a dark and painful place to go as a writer, and I still don’t think I’ve totally shaken it off, to be honest with you.

The story includes scanned pages of the script, which are even more revealing than what Boal says in the interview. Maya’s reactions in that sequence aren’t an acting choice: they’re baked into the script. When she says I’m okay, the script clearly notes that “She’s not.” At one point, “she is on the verge of vomiting.” “The stress and strain on her face is enormous” as she participates in Ammar’s waterboarding—though the movie makes clear that the damage to him is more considerable than it is to her. At the end of the scene? “Dan and Maya exit. They’ve learned nothing.”

I don’t think that Kathryn Bigelow and Boal did themselves any particular favors in the way they’ve talked about Zero Dark Thirty. Describing it as a quasi-journalistic enterprise and insisting on the film’s neutrality may have seemed like a way to provide political cover to it, but refusing to stake out a position left them with essentially nothing to defend but their process as the debate over the movie heated up. Releasing the script and talking about their intentions could have opened up a debate about whether the film lived up to those intentions, a conversation that would have struck me as both politically and artistically useful.

The Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan used my argument that NBC’s Deception would be a better show if it had any racial consciousness whatsoever as an example in a piece he wrote recently complaining that pop culture criticism has gotten overly political. So we sat down so I could explain to him why for me, asking for better politics is a way of asking for better characterization and more carefully grounded conflicts:

It was an interesting conversation for me: I don’t possess nearly the confidence that Michael does to tell other folks that their distress at something they see reflected in mass culture is dumb or wrong. I may not find something personally distressing in the way another interlocutor does. But if someone’s finding themselves upset by something they’re seeing in media, or hitting a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment, that, for me, is generally a sign I should take a look at the writing or performance to see if execution’s gone soft, an expected sharpness has been blunted, or if intentions have gone badly awry. Incredibly stupid racism or sexism doesn’t normally make its way into mainstream pop culture (with some execptions) as a matter of intention. More often, there’s some kind of craft gone badly awry.

The bridge is yours.

-The Super Bowl’s delay did no favors to Elementary.

-Lucy Alibar + Guillermo del Toro seems promising.

-It would be really delightful if we could make Beyoncé as Wonder Woman happen.

-That Ann Dowd is going to be involved makes me even more excited about Masters of Sex than I previously was, and I was previously pretty on board.

-Is it me, or do the new Community ads look like they’re….trying a little hard?

The news broke this morning that NBC, which has been making efforts to improve the diversity of its casting, is not only rebooting Ironside, the show about a police detective who uses a wheelchair which debuted for the first time on NBC in 1967, making it the only broadcast network to have a show with a lead with a disability, but is casting Blair Underwood in that lead role, making him the only black male lead on broadcast television. That’s great news, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for the show, but Media Matters’ Oliver Willis raises a good point:

As I told Oliver, one of the reasons Underwood was cast is that NBC has a holding deal with him, which means that he’s committed in advance to work on a set number of projects for them. When networks are casting characters for new shows, it makes sense for them to look to the people they have holding deals with first: it’s a pool of actors they’ve already determined that they like, and that they have incentives to work with immediately to get as much value as they can over those existing deals. It’s one thing for an actor to break in to one role, but another one entirely for a network to decide that they want to be in the Blair Underwood business, or the Vanessa Williams business, in a genuine and long-term way.

In other words, if television is to get more diverse, we need more actors of color who are not just breaking in as one-time things, but who are being treated like franchise players. I’m encouraged by the news that Echo Kellum, who was wonderfully winsome and funny on the now-cancelled Ben & Kate has already found work again on NBC’s The Gates. Television isn’t going to start looking like the United States if there’s only a tiny pool of actors of color who have been stamped network-approved.

The breaking news in the Hollywood Reporter’s profile of Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy is how she talked J.J. Abrams, who was reluctant to take on the work, into directing Star Wars Episode VII. But to me, the really fascinating part of Kim Masters’ reporting is the portrait it paints of the ways Kennedy’s balanced her work and her family—and the work Kennedy’s done over the years to make sure Steven Spielberg has everything he’s needed to make his movies. As much as there are structural barriers to women getting opportunities in Hollywood, I also think a major challenge is that it’s not easy for a lot of women to pick up and leave their families for three months at a time:

In her new position, she will split her time between the Lucasfilm offices at Disney and the company’s headquarters in the Presidio of San Francisco. Usually Kennedy flies to the Bay Area on a Tuesday and returns to Los Angeles on a Thursday evening — a schedule she says allows her to spend more time with her family than she could during long film shoots. On the heels of War Horse, which had her living in England for three months, Kennedy spent another three months away from home in Richmond, Va., for Lincoln.

It’s easier to make sacrifices when you have people accommodating your needs and making you feel comfortable and supported, something Kennedy’s done for other people for a long time. When she went to work for Apocalypse Now writer John Milius:

Kennedy’s first task was cataloging Milius’ gun collection. “I consequently know the difference between a Colt .45 and a Colt .45 Gold Cup,” she says. “I know what a Winchester Over Under is. Things that I have no desire to know, I know because of John Milius.” Milius is one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life characters, and Kennedy acknowledges, “There was a fair amount of insane things going on. I tried to ignore the things that I didn’t find particularly appropriate and carried on,” she says. “I did have thoughts every now and then of, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ But I knew I wanted to make movies, and I knew it was somewhat of a means to an end.”

And it’s clear that, in a more respectful, less exploitative way, Spielberg’s leaned heavily on Kennedy over the years, too:

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Spielberg seems to feel some sense of grievance that his old friend Lucas has taken Kennedy away. Lucas called to raise the issue during a dubbing session on Lincoln. “He actually asked for her hand in business,” says Spielberg. “I wasn’t going to stand in her way.”…She and Spielberg say their parting is not permanent. One project that could reunite them would be a fifth Indiana Jones, but Spielberg is clear: “I will not make another Indiana Jones film unless it’s based on George’s story.” Lucas intends for that to happen, says Spielberg, though the timetable is unclear — the gap between the previous two movies was 19 years. “Kathy and I will figure out some way to work together again,” he says, before adding, as if counting the days, “She has a five-year contract.”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with visionaries—or even folks who aren’t visionaries, but mostly really solid, middlebrow directors—needing help. You don’t transform ideas on the page into convincing flesh-and-blood realities without producers. That’s a role some people are suited to spend their whole careers fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean that women who have bigger plans should get stuck supporting other people’s careers, rather than pursuing their own, just because they’re good at that. It means that we need to think about not just what it takes to get women in Hollywood the opportunities to chase those dreams, but the conditions they need to chase them, given that the choices they face about work and family may be influenced by difference forces than those choices are for men. I have my doubts about Star Wars Episode VII. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not rooting for Kennedy to succeed to the utmost.